Cover Story: Chris Ware’s “Protocol”

The voice in my mind nagged me all through October: “Get your flu shots.” An otherwise fairly responsible parent, I was for some reason late to the inoculation party this year, a tardiness for which I had no real excuse, especially amid the Dallas Ebola scare, which sent me and my wife to our iPhones for the latest news when we should have been paying closer attention to more mundane matters of family health. But the real-life Hollywood movie appeared to have been green-lit, filming as we watched: the government was bumbling, the Dallas hospital was ass-covering, guys in yellow suits were disinfecting doorways in the middle of the night, parents were pulling their children out of school, protocols were being breached, caution was abundant, and soon, surely, we’d all be fogging our safety goggles and duct-taping ourselves into homemade Hefty-bag hazmat suits to fight over potable water, probably even here in Oak Park, Illinois.

The voice kept up: “Get your flu shots!” One morning, it cut through the excitement just long enough for me to place the call to my daughter Clara’s pediatrician: “I’m sorry, Mr. Ware, the earliest we have is late next week.” (This was a Monday.) A Timeseditorial by Frank Bruni, calling for flu inoculations despite the hubbub, amplified my anxiety, as did my mother, who called from San Antonio: “We got our shots in August at Walgreens; you really shouldn’t wait any longer, especially for Clara’s sake.” Mom was right. My stepfather, a recently retired cardiologist, seconded her medical advice, and I figured that if Walgreens was good enough for a heart doctor who’d spent his life caring for patients in emergencies it was probably good enough for us, too.

As a kid who read a lot of science fiction, I’m not sure what I thought American health care would be by the time I became an adult, but I certainly didn’t expect it to involve shelves of Extreme Doritos, buckets of off-brand Cheez Doodles, bottles of Hennessey capped with black-plastic theft hats, and wire bins of hot-pink Koosh balls. Opposite the swooshing pharmacy doors through which my daughter and I entered, in a corner, stood a convincing waiting-room stage set that led into a pretty believable simulation of a doctor’s examination room, into which we were called after we’d entered our names onto a touch screen ringed with Corbis images of smiling old people and multiracial families cast in golden, health-giving sunlight.

My doubts were put a little at ease by a gentle white-haired man of about sixty, who wore a white coat and spent most of his doctoring time data-entering our insurance information into a Windows terminal and not laughing at my jokes, while Clara, who is nine, sat on the crinkly paper of the tall foldy bed kvetching about whether it would be better for me or her to get the shot first. But soon medical records were updated, sleeves rolled up, needles uncapped, eyes averted, “all done”s said with the pinprick’s first feel, and Band-Aids firmly pressed amid the nostril-opening scent of rubbing alcohol. No mistakes were made. Whew. Done! My daughter and I giddily exited past the other waiting parents and children, and I bought her a Big Grab of Harvest Cheddar SunChips.

It seems to me especially horrible that the recent outbreak of Ebola has erupted in the same region of the planet from which many Americans were brought to this continent against their will. The P.R. surrounding the disease has not looked good from the start, first with the sluggishness of the West’s response in West Africa, then with the reaction to its progress in America. When Thomas Eric Duncan failed to receive the same experimental drug treatment that had saved two white Americans, my stepfather pointed out that Duncan’s blood type was too rare to find a match for an alternative blood treatment in time. Even so, if I was a member of Duncan’s family, I would have been angry about his treatment, too. Then again, we are all members of that family.

When I talked with my mom during our next weekly phone call, I was ready for her query, “Did you get your flu shots?” But I wasn’t prepared to suddenly recognize her voice, in a flash of insight, as that of my inner worrier. I’d always known I was running Mom 1.0 as my base operating code, but I hadn’t realized it had reached a Siri level of user interface. “Yes!” I nonetheless reported, stumbling over my epiphany. “Clara and I went this week.” Mom paused, sighed. “Whew,” she said. “Done!”

Chris Ware has contributed graphic fiction and twenty-five covers to The New Yorker since 1999.